


To and fro in dreams

by Lilliburlero



Category: The Foggy Foggy Dew - Benjamin Britten/Peter Pears (Song)
Genre: 1800s, 1910s, Gen, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Ireland, Non-Graphic Violence, Sectarianism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-25
Updated: 2018-05-25
Packaged: 2019-05-13 18:35:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,667
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14754110
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: An old man tells a story, a story as old as songs.





	To and fro in dreams

**Author's Note:**

  * For [elstaplador](https://archiveofourown.org/users/elstaplador/gifts).



When I was only a chisler, I said to Mammy I wished we lived upstairs in the Tenement, instead of down here in our flat and she gave me a skelp for wishing black misfortune on us. I know better now, because the flat has a bedroom and a parlour-kitchen with a range for just Mammy and James, Margaret, Mary Ann and myself. I come in between Maggie and Mary Ann, but it’s manners to put yourself last. There’s Elizabeth, who’s older again than James but she’s in service in Lusk, and we see her the last Sunday or Wednesday in the month. James used work as a messenger at Jacob’s but he never got his job back after the Lockout and he’s had a round dozen since, none of them lasting more than a fortnight. Mammy does be despairing of him, but maybe number thirteen’ll be his luck. He says there’ll never be a call-up here, the Members of Parliament and the bishops and the priests wouldn’t stand for it but if there was he would have to go to France and he might lose a leg like Johnny Hyland and take to the drink like him, so I remember the Members of Parliament and the bishops in my prayers to give them strength of mind and love of our country but I can’t see how they’d stop the King sending James to France if he wanted. James says I’m a milksop crybaby and he strikes me with the rolled-up _Evening Telegraph_ if I don’t lepp out his way but I don’t want him to go and get parts of himself shot off all the same.

Mr Benjamin says our flat was probably the butler’s pantry when the house was owned and lived in by one family. Mr Benjamin’s room is the one I got a skelp upside the head for. When this tall old house was turned into the Tenement the ballroom was partitioned into four, four green fields Mr Benjamin says and I say think the walls are more blue but according to him that doesn’t matter, because by four green fields he means the four provinces of Ireland, Ulster, Leinster, Munster and Connaught. He lives in the one that is ‘Ulster’ because it is to the north and east, and that’s right and proper he said, because his father was a weaver. The walls that do be real walls and not lath partitions are sort of curvy because the ballroom was an oval and up above there are carvings, except Mr Benjamin says they are just mouldings, of seashells full of fruit and fellas and young wans dancing and playing the fiddle. I say _yeh, what a shower of culchies_ but that’s just slagging because they’re wearing Grecian robes and secretly I still think they’re lovely even if now I don’t want to live under them because it’s better to have a range for a woman’s work is never done. 

‘Do you know, I was just thinking,’ Mr Benjamin says in his soft English voice, ‘that when the first balls took place here in this great room, my father was probably about the same age as you are now. It is not such a long time for such precipitous decline, not long at all.’ 

I should describe him now, right enough. I was after forgetting, because I know him so well. He’s very small, hardly taller than Maggie, and she only thirteen years of age. He’s all baldy, with just little puffs of white hair over his ears, in his neck, and one very thin one up top his forehead, and a beaky nose. His skin is like old newspaper except for his hands that are twisted up, purple and always cold. His eyes are so pale a grey that they hardly have colouredy parts at all. His black suit is shiny and mended but he always wears a collar and a tie knotted in a floppy old-style bow, and broken patent-leather slippers with pointy toes like a girl’s. His other shirt hangs on a peg over his bedstead, which hasn’t a mattress let alone a sheet or a blanket to it but only a rag-rug thrun over it, but he says he doesn’t sleep much anyway, pity to waste the little time he’s left sleeping, so he just naps in the easy chair, which is all over shiny and patched like his suit, but with different colours like Joseph’s coat, if all the colours in Joseph’s coat were brown and grey and serge-blue. He eats a plate of peas a day at an eating-house on Rutland Square and he is a Daily Communicant. On the shelf wedged between the blue wall and the lath partition he has a statue of Mary with her small pale foot on a snake, but you can see it is made of wood because it has woodworm holes and that makes it seem less idolatrous than a plaster one. I think it is queer that he is English and Catholic and we are Irish and Protestant but he says it is not so queer to be Catholic in Lancashire, which is where he comes from, a wild sort of inhabitation to be in, that was never so very English as the rest of England. He calls it the County Palatine and I know a song about the Palatine’s Daughter so I sing it for him, rye tie aye de diddle rye tie fol de diddle rye tie aye de diddle air aye oh! 

Now I have described him I can go on with our conversation and the story he telt me. Just so’s you can picture it, I’m sitting cross-legged on the rag-rug over the bare springs, and he’s in the drab and many-coloured easy chair. 

‘What’s press-ip—‘ 

‘Precipitous. Falling off quickly. I am eighty years old this coming Monday, and my father was forty-seven when I was born, so of what year do I speak?’ (I was having trouble with my arithmetic back before Christmas so Mr Benjamin taught me how to stack the numbers up and I can do it almost without thinking now, but he still sets me sums when we talk.) 

‘Seventeen ninety-eight.’ 

‘Quite so. A momentous year. As was the year of his birth, seventeen eighty-nine.’ It still seems a fierce long time ago to me, but put that way, that here I am talking to a man whose father was a little boy when Wolfe Tone and Napper Tandy roamed the land, I start to see it a bit different too. ‘But of course,’ he went on, ‘he knew little enough of that, growing up across the Irish Sea, in the small village sheltering at the foot of Roynton Pike. 

‘In those days there only a few mills for the making of cloth; instead weavers worked out of their own homes, and it was fine, hard-wearing stuff they made, not like the mass-produced shoddy of today. We’ve lost their arts. I never had more than a journeyman’s talent for the trade, which is well enough, because it was factory work by my time, and now—’ he looks down at his purple claws. 

‘But they didn’t go without a fight. Well, you know about this. Your brother is a Union man. When my father was a young man there were no unions, so they only way they could protest against the owners putting them out of work was to go into the mills at night and break the stocking frames. They weren’t superstitious or ignorant; they didn’t hate the machines, but the masters. They blacked their faces with cork, but my father returning one night came almost face to face with the mill foreman. He got away, but was sure he had been recognised. If you were found guilty of frame-breaking you were hanged, so there was nothing for it but there and then, to leave the village where he had spent every night of his life. He was then twenty-three years old. 

‘He made his way to the liberties of London, where he worked as a tapster for a time, then befriended a ship’s surgeon whose assistant had become addicted to laudanum and run away. He entered the man’s service and sailed as a loblolly boy, a lowly enough position to be sure, but an interesting one. The surgeon’s father was an Irishman, his mother Catalan, and he hated tyranny, so my father told him the whole of his story. But they broke company in Batavia, where my father fell ill with yellow fever, and was taken to hospital there, while the ship sailed on to a sultanate in the South China Sea. When his shipmates returned for him, they were mistakenly informed that my father had died, and so he was abandoned. 

'He worked at first as an orderly in the hospital, and then went into the service of one of the hospital’s benefactors, staying with this Dutchman through the Java wars that came after. His master valued him, it seemed, because when he died he left my father a sum of money sufficient to buy his passage home and set himself up comfortably, in a small way, making fine and luxurious stuffs for those who valued the old handloom cloth. In all, he had been away from the little village at the foot of the Pike more than twenty years. The millowner whose stocking frames he had broken was dead, and the old manor house passed to his sister, a lady of Liverpool, who lived there with her only son, much spoilt since his father’s death, for his mother had doted on her husband, and the young man was as much his image in looks as he was his opposite in temperament. 

‘The mistress of the Hall employed a good few Irish servants, that she had brought with her from Liverpool, and my father got to know them well, as they all went to Mass at a chapel three miles away. He made a particular friend of the gamekeeper, a widower of about his own years, whose tied cottage was the closest to his own. The gamekeeper had a daughter who kept house for him, a ravishingly pretty girl with black hair and soft eyes, just the colour of the mists that would roll into Roynton from the plain to the west, the freezing winter mists that hung for days and the summer mists that burned off at a touch of the low round angry sun. 

‘Since my father, having his little competency, could work to suit himself, he often accompanied the gamekeeper onto the moor, spending whole days and nights in his company. I never knew this great friend of my father's, the reasons for which I shall shortly relate, but though my father spoke of him seldom, he did so always in the warmest of terms, as the best, kindest and most honourable man he had ever known, and rarely without a quaver in his voice and a quick look away into the middle distance. He gave my father a present of a fine old fowling piece, which I would show you, but it is in the care of our uncle, if you take my meaning. Any road, one morn he missed him on the customed hill, or rather, at the old milestone where they used to meet for a day’s rambling and snare-setting. This was out of character for the gamekeeper, so my father went straight across the field, to find his daughter under the impression that her father had spent the night with him, as he sometimes did, rather than wake her crashing about with a drop taken. Anyway, the long and short of it was a search was mounted, and the gamekeeper found up on the moors with a ball in his guts—slain upon the high places, except that he lived just long enough to exact a promise from my father that he would take care of his beloved Peggy, his little dark rose.’ 

‘She was your mammy, wasn’t she?’ I say, though I guessed it as soon as I heard of the colour of her eyes. 

‘Yes, yes, she was.’ 

‘And so your da married her? The End?’ I’m disappointed because there’s a song that goes maids when you’re young never wed an old man, because they’ve got no fall-oo-room, and I know exactly what that means but I shouldn’t, Mammy would leather me. 

‘Not in so many words. There’s more to the story. He’d been a bachelor two score year and more, and never had a notion to marry, and having been a sailor, mostly knew how to do for himself as well as any woman could. Perhaps—well, have you ever come up with a very plausible, that is, a very good reason for doing something, that makes sense in company, but isn’t the reason you want to do it at all?’ 

At first I don’t think so, but then I think of Eileen Clarke saying that if you walked thrice round the Black Church you’ll see the Devil, and I said I was doing it to prove her Pape superstitions wrong, but really I wanted to see him, wings and horns and all, but when I didn’t she said of course it wouldn’t work because I was a swaddling Proddy dog and I said you do it then but she dursent. I nod. 

‘Well, that’s what my father did. He said to himself it wouldn’t be decent to take a young woman half his age into his house as a lodger, even though he employed a old woman as a cook-general, for cooking he had never learned, with whom she might have slept. But the real reason was that Peggy’s presence would remind him always of the friend he had lost, and he couldn’t bear it. But the tied cottage would be needed for the promoted under-gamekeeper, who had a wife and child, and though Peggy had family in Ireland, she had not seen them since infancy, and it would be a sad uprooting for her. 

‘He said it was the only thing he ever did wrong, in the full consciousness of doing it. Grave matter, full knowledge, deliberate consent. He dithered until the Hall offered her a housemaid’s situation, half out of pity, because she’d never been reared or trained to service. But it seemed like a solution, until that very Hallows Eve. 

‘My father was alone in his cottage, the old cook having gone to visit her nephew, and he was going about closing the shutters and banking the fires before taking himself to bed. The mist was uncommon thick and dreepy, even for the season that was in it. Now, my father was not a superstitious man, for like many weavers he had taken trouble to educate himself, and he trusted in God and the Church. But he _had_ , as I say, been a sailor. And as he was shuttering the parlour window, he caught sight of a human shape, stumbling through the muffling swirls. His blood chilled, for his immediate thought was that it was the ghost of his friend, returned for justice—for all the the inquiry into his killing had returned was a guess that it must have been a poacher surprised, who had fired and fled into the moorland mists, never to be seen again. He watched, compelled, as the figure grew closer, turning from a grey smudge to a white wraith, but silent all the time, for the fog dampened all sound—until (he said it was like when your hearing returned after the noise and confusion of a battle at sea) the air filled with a woman’s screams. He hurried to the door to confront whatever it was, thinking dimly that if he were to die at least he would be reunited with his friend, and Peggy, dressed only in her shift and drenched to the bone, ran weeping into his arms. 

‘She was distraught and delirious, and would say nothing but _the dew, the foggy, foggy dew_. My father held her, cursing the hour he had given the cook the night off, and a fear that he had not felt since his cork-blacked nose nearly touched the foreman’s crept into his heart. He lit lamps again, wrapped her in a blanket and took her to the kitchen, drew and boiled water for her to wash. Her face and wrists were bruised, and her feet and lower legs cut and scratched from her run across the yards and fields. He found her some clean linen, and put her to bed on the pallet in the kitchen alcove where the cook slept. But he had barely reached his own chamber before she was there in the doorway, shivering and crying that the fog had crept into the kitchen and was smothering and drowning her. So he let her into his bed, and he lay on the floor at the foot of it, and not a wink did he sleep, for thinking how blame might fall upon him. 

‘The next morning she was calmer but she would neither speak of what had happened to her nor return to the Hall, which she said was poisoned by the malicious foggy dew. My father pieced it together from what she did not deny: a story as old as songs, of a dissolute man of high degree who courted and flattered and wheedled and promised until he had what he wanted, then, charged to uphold his side of the bargain, turned threatening and cruel. My father made her an offer of marriage then, to preserve her reputation and give her a home. But she turned him down, saying that he was such a bachelor as a nuptial Mass could not turn into a husband. She had an aunt in Clonmel, she said; if he would write a letter to her dictation, for she was no great hand with a pen, and accompany her; she had not wanted to go when her father was killed, because she was caught up in a dream of being the lady of the manor, but— 

‘And then my father saw, and the next instant wished he might have blinded himself. Her seducer had taken some hand in the gamekeeper’s death—perhaps it had been an accident in the fog, that he had then turned to his advantage in bringing the girl under his power, perhaps worse, but either way blackguardly. He knew also that if he did not absent himself with all haste, he would be tempted to an irresistible vengeance on his own account. Again the gallows hush and creak filled his ears; he saw the crowd and felt the rough hemp collar, the knot in the back of his neck. 

‘He swiftly made preparations, and took her away to her aunt’s. And so I was born in Clonmel, a brassy, purse-lipped garrison town, in the springing of the year. My mother’s aunt thought that her niece’s prospects would be much improved if she appeared in that meagre, gaudy little society as a tragic widow who had lost not only a husband but then what she called _the dear pledge of his love_ , and I daresay the vulgar old bit—of consequence was right, so at a few months of age I was put into my father’s arms again and he returned with me to—’ 

Just then there’s a ferocious clatter and streel in the street, nailed boots and horseshoes on cobbles, drums and fifes and what-have-you and the folk of ‘Connaught’ rush to ‘Munster’ and ‘Leinster’, with their tall front windows, to see what all the commotion is about, Johnny Hyland’s crutch dot and carrying last of all. I look at Mr Benjamin and he shrugs with a smile. 

‘Go and see,’ he says. ‘This tale’s kept for eighty years, it’ll hold another ten minutes.’ 

But on the way out I run into Maggie, and she clips my ear and says, ‘That’s where yeh were all along, ya little melt, hiding away gabbing to that quare auld English bollix, you’ll be sorry when yeh get mo-lested, look it, it’s six o’clock, there’s the Angelus—get down them stairs before Mammy—’ 

Maggie wants people to think she’s hard-bitten and cute, not soft from having a range to dry her knickers over and sleeping in a back bedroom. It’s only some recruits, anyway, marching up to the Linenhall. I wish I’d stayed and heard the story. 

*** 

I wish I’d stayed and heard the story, because when I next went back up to ‘Ulster’ on Monday, bringing the quarter of humbugs that I got off of Donie Ogle (swops for two of James’s Woodbines I'd swiped), I found Mr Benjamin dead, and on his birthday too. I wish I could’ve said he looked peaceful asleep in his chair but he didn’t, it looked like he’d got up, felt giddy and then fallen when he tried to sit back down again, so his face was planted side-on in the cushions and all horrid and blotched black with the blood that ran to it and his tongue swole blue and sticking out. I’d only ever seen dead bodies when they were decently laid out before, so it was a shock, and I still remember the way his shoulder felt when I touched it, a whole sack full of heavy nothing at all, like the quick shiver of winter and the slow muggy weight of summer at once. I ate all the humbugs in a sitting, like they were a Catholic penance, and I felt mighty shook after, though I didn't boke them up. 

Most people in this holy kip of a town probably remember that Easter Monday, the twenty-fourth of April nineteen-sixteen, for other things, and fair play like, it’d be only natural considering, but that’s what I remember it for, and will to the end of my days, so help me God.

**Author's Note:**

> The Lockout: 1913, [a crucial event in Irish labour history](https://www.historyireland.com/20th-century-contemporary-history/the-dublin-1913-lockout/).
> 
> [The Palatine’s Daughter](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Bzwayooyms): nothing to do with the English Counties Palatine, but referring to early 18th-century refugees who came to Ireland from the Lower German Palatinate. In Irish, the song has (jocose) Catholic triumphalist overtones, as the singer overcomes his Protestant girlfriend's request to forgo the Mass, and instead ensures her conversion and assimilation. English translations tend not to reproduce this aspect of the song.
> 
> Wolfe Tone and Napper Tandy: United Irishmen involved in the insurrection of 1798. If you think you recognise a fictional comrade of theirs from another canon, you're right.
> 
> to go into the mills at night and break the stocking frames: the Luddites opposed not technology but a lack of workers' rights. The Frame Breaking Act 1812 made industrial sabotage of this kind a capital crime.
> 
> the Java wars: roughly [1825-30](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_War)
> 
> it is in the care of our uncle: in pawn
> 
> there's a song that goes maids when you’re young never wed an old man: [here sung by the Dubliners](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C21-l0idoeo).
> 
> if you walked thrice round the Black Church you’ll see the Devil: [St Mary's Chapel-of-Ease, St Mary's Place in north Dublin](http://www.dublincity.ie/dublin-buildings/black-church).
> 
> slain upon the high places: 2 Sam. 1:19
> 
> [Linenhall](https://thearchaeologyof1916.wordpress.com/2016/04/05/in-search-of-the-linen-hall-barracks/): Dublin barracks mainly used to house Army recruits at the date of this fic.
> 
> the twenty-fourth of April nineteen-sixteen: The first day of the Easter Rising, the subject of the _other_ [Foggy Dew](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaS3vaNUYgs), from which the title of the fic is taken.


End file.
